The pundits have declared Barack Obama to be the winner of last night’s third and final presidential debate of the 2012 general election.

The big loser?

It’s not Mitt Romney.

The loser in the bid for buzz was social media itself. Twitter and Facebook, the prime sources of instant commentary on the presidential campaign, rung up lower numbers than the record-breaking response to the first debate.

Call it debate fatigue or social media overkill.

Besides the spike in activity over Obama’s “fewer horses and bayonets” comment, Twitter came 4 million tweets short last night of breaking the record set by the first presidential debate.

Despite the social media slump, both campaigns were able to enlist new followers on various social media platforms.

And who was the winner?

Even though Republicans clearly approached social media with a specific strategy in mind, Obama’s team was once again able to engage more users throughout the night.

How it all played out:

Breakdown of mentions was provided by U.S. Politics on Facebook (www.facebook.com/uspolitics) and @gov on Twitter (www.twitter.com/@gov). (Jana Kasperkevic/Hearst Newspapers)

This might have been a foreign policy debate, but the conversation often strayed to other topics as well, including economy (20 percent), taxes (7 percent), and energy and environment (4 percent).

Engagement:

Just as in the last debate, Obama’s campaign out-tweeted Romney’s. @BarackObama Twitter account was actively tweeting and re-tweeting during the debate, even re-tweeting non campaign accounts such as @ThinkProgress and @EdHenryTV.

Both campaigns also utilized Twitter to solicit donations by sending out the following tweets:

(Jana Kasperkevic/Houston Chronicle)

Prior to the debate, both campaigns posted engaging messages accompanied by colorful graphics on their Facebook pages. Romney’s graphic received more “likes,” 183,979 to Obama’s 139,931, but it only got half of the shares and comments that Obama’s graphic did. Considering, that Romney only has one third of the followers on Facebook that Obama has, one could say that they were equally successful in engaging Facebook users.

Both campaigns attempted to engage their followers and supporters prior to the debate. (Jana Kasperkevic/Houston Chronicle)

However, Obama’s campaign also shared the following graphic on Twitter and on Facebook. The campaign engaged the Facebook users by specifically asking them to “Share” the post and within 34 minutes, the graphic was shared 19,743 times. The tweet containing the graphic did not include any instructions for engagement and consequently, over the span of nine hours, the graphic was only re-tweeted 7,458 times.

Obama’s campaign asked their followers and supporters to share the image above if they thought that President Obama had won the third and last presidential debate. (Jana Kasperkevic/Houston Chronicle)

The Last Presidential Debate in Trends: P

Republicans went into this debate prepared to dominate the social media. While Romney for President Inc. splurged for a promoted trend of #CantAfford4more, organizations such End Spending Action Fund and American CrossRoads paid for promoted pro-Romney/Ryan tweets, which appear on various searches for both Obama and Romney.

YouTube, which was streaming the debate, also paid to promote tweets on such searches.

Promoted twitter debate 3

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Stop the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) organization had its own plans for last night’s debate – to Twitter bomb it with hash tag StopNDAA. #StopNDAA did in fact trend in Texas early on and later even became a nationwide as well as worldwide Twitter trend.

The Twitterverse might have been suffering from debate fatigue during this third and final presidential debate, considering that the amount of tweets sent out during the debate only reached 6.5 million, down from 7.2 million during the second debate and 10.3 million during the first debate.

However, as always there were number of peak moments during the debate, with Obama’s “fewer horses and bayonets” and Shieffer’s “I think we all love teachers” comments.

(@gov/Twitter)

Romney’s campaign might have paid to have a promoted trend, but Obama’s zingers such as his response that Romney is attempting to “airbrush history” and his “fewer horses and bayonets” comment quickly became worldwide trends. Even his response “Nothing Governor Romney says is true” became a “Nothing Gov” trending topic in the U.S. and “Nothing Governor Romney” worldwide.

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